Part Six
The Terminal Woodland Period in Southern Minnesota
A.D. 500/700 - 1150/1300
By A.D. 500, new trends in the manufacture of ceramic vessels and stone projectile points become apparent among Woodland cultures in southeastern Minnesota and adjacent parts of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois. Changes in some aspects of social organization and religion were apparently occurring, too, for burial of elite individuals in large earthen mounds with non-utilitarian items made from exotic materials disappears. Other trends already visible in Late Archaic and Initial Woodland cultures in the region, such as increased reliance on domesticated plants and human population growth, continue and probably are more fundamental to understanding the transformation in human lifeways that was occurring.
Many but not all of these cultural innovations and elaborations reached southwestern Minnesota by at least A.D. 900. More dramatic changes occurred throughout the southern part of the state between A.D. 900 and 1100, when agricultural societies with large, often defended villages and new material equipment appeared. Later forms of these “Mississippian” cultures still occupied parts of southern Minnesota when European missionaries and adventurers first paddled the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers.
Since a wide variety of cultural practices continued to differentiate Native Americans in the southeastern from those in the southwestern corner of the state, we continue to discuss them separately, as we did in Part 4. Chapters 14 and 15 review the presence of the Terminal Woodland archaeological record and its associated lifeways in southeastern and southwestern, Minnesota, respectively. Mississippian farmers and later trends are the subject of Part 7.
Contributors to this section: Guy Gibbon
Date of last contribution: December 2008